Flash Streaming Server Recommendations?

[ILikeTurtles]

I work for a small multimedia company, and we're interested in a hosted Flash streaming server. I thought I'd check here for recommendations first on hosting companies that specialize in this type of thing.

We don't want to run our own server. Looked into that, and we can't justify the cost of running our own box.

Thanks in advance!

 

[designguy79]

I am not 100% sure what you mean by "streaming Flash", but I would assume you mean streaming video with an embeddable Flash player?

I use (and really like) www.phanfare.com (the only caveat is that their player doesn't do auto-play last I checked)

 

[ILikeTurtles]

Yes - streaming Flash video. Thanks for the suggestion - I will look into it.

 

[lucidmedia]

are you looking to simply stream flash movies, or are you looking for a specific "Flash Media Server" Vendor.

What features are you looking for?

 

[ILikeTurtles]

are you looking to simply stream flash movies, or are you looking for a specific "Flash Media Server" Vendor.

What features are you looking for?

Yes I need a Flash Media Server - a vendor who provides a server with the ability to stream Flash video. We just want the ability to do real streaming of Flash Videos. Nothing more than that. Right now our ISP does not offer true streaming, so we have to do progressive download, which just isn't cutting it.

 

[smetvid]

There is a big difference between Flash video and Flash streaming video. True streaming video is more secure and never downloaded to the end users computer. Streaming video can also be live which is what our company does a lot of and is the main reason why Flash is very important to us and our clients.

You might want to check out Influxis. They are a great company and have some pretty decent price systems with endless options. Then there is of course the big dogs like Limelight and Highwinds which usually have a mininum use of 1000 streaming customers a day and can be very expensive unless you plan on doing that much streaming.

Influxis has great tech support and performance. Every now and then there servers can go down for a few minutes but you only really notice if you are streaming a live event and it happens to go down at that exact time. It never happened to us when we used them but it did happen once 30 minutes before the event. Kind of freaked us out so we switched to Limelight and Highwinds.

One thing to note about Influxis is that they support the full FMIS which is the Flash Media Interactive Server. This allows you to write some pretty hardcore server based Flash apps for group games/chat rooms and so forth.

Hope this helps.